Fires fuel passage of Senate bill to strip undergrowth

Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, October 30, 2003

2003-10-30 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- With almost every advocate citing the Southern California infernos as a reason for action, the Senate passed a bipartisan proposal Wednesday that would speed the removal of forest undergrowth that fuels the West's catastrophic fires.

The Senate approved the compromise proposal, whose main proponents include Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., by 97-1, as it opened debate on long- stalled "Healthy Forests" legislation that addresses millions of acres of federally owned forest lands across the West. Final passage of the overall bill could come today.

The House, which approved a different version of the forests bill in May, on Wednesday passed a spending bill that provides $800 million for wildfire suppression, an increase of $289 million from the previous budget year and $937 million for wildfire preparedness, slightly more than the current spending. Congress has already voted an extra $300 million for Western firefighting, bringing the total for the year to $3.2 billion.

The fight in Congress, which has dragged on for years, is not over money to fight forest and brush fires, but over strategies for thinning forests to make natural fires less deadly. Proponents say that accomplishing that goal will require curbing lawsuits and protests by environmentalists who fear that a policy of increased forest clearing is merely a pretense for allowing more logging in some of the nation's most pristine and ancient Western forests.

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"The California fires are a symbol of what's been happening across America for years as we have fallen into an inability to implement forest management decisions," said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who supported Feinstein's bipartisan proposal.

The Feinstein-backed amendment, which she drafted after long negotiations with six Republican and four other Democratic senators, calls for clearing undergrowth from at least 20 million of the 57 million acres of U.S. forest land rated at highest risk for fires. More than 8 million of that at-risk acreage is in California, where the current fires have killed 18 people, destroyed more than 2,000 homes and scorched 600,000 acres.

To accomplish that goal, the proposal would limit the options that federal planners would have to consider for each project and would call for expedited judicial review when suits are filed against clearing plans.

The plan also says that half of the $760 million set aside each year for forest thinning -- a $340 million increase from current spending -- must go for projects near areas where towns meet forests.

"This is pro-environmental legislation and seeks to reverse some of the damage we have done to our forests," Feinstein said on the Senate floor. She was referring to the century-old practice of suppressing forest fires and the subsequent failure to clear enough brush and often-diseased small trees, a policy that results in more intense fires around areas into which the West's burgeoning population is increasingly intruding.

Feinstein showed a blown-up photo of houses intermingled with dead and dying pine trees around Lake Arrowhead, an area endangered by the current Southern California fires. "This is eloquent and direct testimony" of the need for her proposal, Feinstein said.

Feinstein and many of her co-sponsors say they won't go along with a House-passed version of a forest-clearing bill that mirrors President Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative." The senators say the House bill doesn't raise funding for hazardous fuels removal, limits citizens' appeals even more than the Senate version, doesn't mandate money to reduce the fire threat around communities and uses loose definitions of old-growth trees, which could encourage logging.

But advocates of the House bill say the raging Southern California fires show the need for action to limit appeals, which, they argue, have held up many forest-clearing projects.

A new General Accounting Office analysis shows that 59 percent of all forest-clearance plans were appealed in fiscal years 2001-02. "This paralysis by analysis continues to threaten our national forests and those who live in and around them," House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, said in a statement. "The Healthy Forests legislation will remove these administrative handcuffs from the Forest Service and allow them to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires."

Pombo's staff also said that the House bill would provide more money for clearing projects by cutting the 40 percent of U.S. Forest Service manpower resources and 20 percent of financial resources that now go to planning projects and handling their implementation.

But Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who opposes the Senate compromise, said environmentalists were being unfairly maligned for blocking forest clearance. He said the GAO study found that only 3 percent of fuel reduction plans had been litigated in 2001 and that only 7 percent of projects had been appealed from 1998 to 2002.

"Yet we're told there's an appeals crisis," Harkin said. "The main reason projects didn't proceed was weather and the diversion of funds to fight forest fires."

But Pombo said environmentalists and their allies were mixing in such projects as Christmas-tree cutting with genuine fire prevention projects to make it look like they weren't blocking projects.

The Sierra Club said the California fires are being used as a rationale to steamroller through a bill that wouldn't have done anything to prevent those fires, most of which aren't on federal lands. It said the House and Senate bills were an excuse to help timber companies cut down more trees.

"The Congress and the Bush administration need the will to protect communities, not the timber industry," the club said in a statement.

Harkin and other opponents of the compromise intend to introduce amendments today, but he conceded that the overall bill dominated by Feinstein's plan would pass. That will set up a House-Senate conference committee, and several senators said the Feinstein compromise was as far as they would go.

"I can't support the House-passed bill, and the other Democrats involved in the compromise can't support it," Feinstein said. "The House-passed bill will not have the 60 votes in this chamber to move it along," she added, referring to the number of votes needed to break a filibuster.

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